Media Clipping — March/April 2002, Coastal Communities News Editorial

DFO Minister Thibault: New Helm, New Direction?

By Scott Milsom

The first month of 2002 brought some interesting developments in the province's commercial fishing industry. On New Year's Day, Herb Dhaliwal was federal Minister of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). He is now gone from that post, replaced by West Nova Member of Parliament Robert Thibault. During his time in office, Dhaliwal made few friends in this province, but hopes are high that Thibault, the first Nova Scotian to serve as DFO Minister since the 1930s, will do a better job. He has experience in the fishery, he studied fisheries management in his younger days, and through his first days in his new office he has spoken more than once about the importance of the fisheries and how they are managed to the well being of coastal communities. We wish him well in his difficult watch at DFO.

Just how difficult that job is likely to be was driven home to me one afternoon in mid-January. I was walking along Spring Garden Road, probably the "trendiest" of Halifax's streets and a place that's probably as far removed, in cultural terms, as one can get from the wharves and quieter streets of the province's small coastal communities. Amid the street people hoping for change, the well-dressed shoppers, the skateboarders, and the executives going to or from their luncheons, stood a man with a sign saying something about jonah crab allocations. As I approached him, I couldn't help but think that many people on this street would probably think that "Jonah Crab" was the name of a rock band.

The man with the sign turned out to be Paul Fraser, who fishes out of South Bar in Cape Breton. He's a soft-spoken fellow, but he is also determined to right what he sees as wrongs done him by DFO. To this end, he is spending weeks on end in a Dartmouth motel room and rotating his protests from Spring Garden Road to Clearwater Seafoods in Bedford and to DFO offices in Dartmouth. Through his measured words, I can almost feel his sense of outrage at how unfairly he feels DFO has treated him. In this, he is far from alone: in recent years, fishermen from different parts of the province (and the country) have occupied DFO offices, lashed themselves to the mast of the Bluenose, or pitched tents of protest at Province House. Many of these people and their sympathizers believe that DFO's long-term plan is to get rid of the many small, independent owner-operators in the fisheries and to turn over our fisheries resources to the corporate sector. It would be a delightful change if, under Minister's Thibault's command, DFO were to show that this is not the case.

GPI-Atlantic (GPI stands for Genuine Progress Index), is a research organization that challenges traditional ways of measuring our economy. Using the standard measure of gross domestic product (GDP), events like the grounding of the Exxon Valdez or the September 11 attacks in New York are seen as positive, because they lead to spending large sums of money on cleaning up spilled oil or on vastly beefed-up security measures. In contrast, GPI assesses the health of our natural resources, the quality of our environment, and the state of our communities. Unlike the GDP, in which "more" is always "better," less crime and less pollution make the GPI go up. The over-fishing that led to the collapse of many of our groundfish stocks a decade ago was a boost to the GDP. In contrast, the GPI would measure the loss of those natural resources and the subsequent damage done to the sustainability of our coastal communities as a social cost, not an economic benefit.

GPI challenges traditional economic thinking by considering the social costs of certain economic activity. It is currently in the midst of a five-year project to look at twenty different sectors of the provincial economy. In mid-January, it released its assessment of Nova Scotia's fisheries sector.

It is the first attempt anywhere to assemble comprehensive biological, social, and economic measures to gauge the well being of fish stocks, the ocean environment, and the coastal communities that depend on them. The report also found that access to groundfish has become more concentrated over time, with fewer people and corporations able to go fishing than in the past. It also warns that this concentration of access to fishery resources could now be happening in the lobster fishery, and that the impact of this on our coastal communities could be disastrous.

At a press conference on the Eastern Shore announcing the release of the GPI fisheries report, its principal author, Dr. Tony Charles, recommended that one of incoming Fisheries Minister Thibault's first jobs should be to read, and to absorb the implications of, the GPI fisheries report.

DFO must begin to take the concerns of people like Paul Fraser seriously, and to treat them with respect. To head the Department in that direction, we can only add our voice to Dr. Charles'. Mr. Minister, please read the GPI fisheries report as one of your earliest duties of office.

Copyright © 2002, Coastal Communities News